Saturday, August 26, 2017

Trump's "virtual cyber-army" is not Russian but American-made

By The Wayne Madsen Report

Donald Trump has often bellowed that he has 100 million followers on Twitter. In fact, Twitter lists 32.4 million followers on Trump's Twitter account. However, most of his "followers" are not even human. There is increasing evidence that Trump's technical team manipulated Twitter by creating Twitter accounts for "bots," anonymous and autonomous programs that mimic real users on the Internet. In the world of biology, a bot is a parasite that lives in the guts of animals until it is defecated in the animal's feces. The biological definition of a bot squares nicely with the technical term when it comes to Trump world.

WMR has detected that its own tweets are automatically re-tweeted by Trump bots even though our tweets are often anti-Trump. The Trump bots are not "intelligent" enough to distinguish between pro- and anti-Trump tweets. This might have occurred as a result of WMR's Twitter account being pre-programmed as one friendly to Trump. Therefore, any tweet from "WMRDC" is automatically recognized by the Twitter bot accounts as pro-Trump and is re-tweeted. WMR has noticed this anomaly for several months. Our anti-Trump tweets are re-transmitted by Twitter accounts that contain long threads of pro-Trump re-tweet messaging. These bots are noticeable for their lack of original tweets, they all merely re-tweet. These bot accounts often contain no user photograph uploaded by the account holder but do feature photos of Trump, "Deplorable," "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) hats, or American flags in the Twitter banners.

Below are two suspected Twitter bots masquerading as actual Trump supporters. "Frank" claims to be a "legal immigrant for Trump" and includes dubious hashtags as "Deplorable," "MAGA," "HillaryforPrison," "Trump," and "BuildthatWall." Frank decided it was worthwhile to re-tweet WMR's comment on the counter-fascist protest in Boston that compared the number of counter-protesters (30,000) to "in-bred fascist" protesters (20). "Burt" claims to be "just a nobody," however, he or it includes as his or its photo a caricature of the alt-right cartoon figure "Pepe," another give-away that this re-tweet of WMRDC's description of Trump's decision to boycott the annual Kennedy Center honors was not part of the bot's programming.

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The creation of perhaps millions of bots on social media was well within the capabilities of four Trump campaign advisers who are connected to Internet "deep data mining" and data manipulation companies. They are Brad Parscale, the founder of San Antonio-based digital media firms Giles-Parscale and TechBloc; Robert and Rebekah Mercer, co-owners of the data manipulation firm Cambridge Analytica; and Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of Palantir Technologies.

The combined efforts of these three companies would have been more than enough to create bot users on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Palantir, which received its start-up funds from the Central Intelligence Agency's IN-Q-TEL venture capital firm, was in a position to transfer its offensive information warfare technology, gathered from its work for the CIA and the U.S. Cyber Command, to Trump "psychometrics" data manipulation and voter profiling teams.Trump's "100 milllion" Twitter followers are a product of his imagination and a "bot army" created by his "Big Three" data manipulators: Cambridge Analytica, Palantir, and Giles-Parscale.

Palantir acquired a UK-based data mining start-up form called Gray Havens. Combined with the data mining technology of Cambridge Analytica, whose parent firm SCL Group, is also based in the UK, the Trump campaign and the current Trump White House is capable of crossing the line from convincing voters to support Trump to manipulating them to do so. Cambridge Analytica has been charged with conducting voter surveillance operations for various political candidates and movements, including Senators Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Thom Tillis; current Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson; the Brexit initiative in the UK, and former U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton. While Facebook is the favorite platform for Cambridge Analytica and Palantir manipulation, with Thiel an early "angel investor" in Facebook, Giles-Parscale appears to have greater abilities to manipulate Twitter and Google, particularly the placement of politically-oriented Google Ads on social media. Brad Parscale is a close associate of Trump son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner.

The one thing that can be determined by Trump's reliance on Cambridge Analytica, Palantir, and Giles-Parscale is that none of these firms are connected directly to Russian intelligence agencies. To the contrary, Palantir is a contractor for the CIA and NSA, while Cambridge Analytica appears to have links to British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) cut-outs at Cambridge University in the UK. Currently, Justice Department special prosecutor Robert Mueller is concentrating his investigation of Trump and his campaign by "following the money" to problematic Eurasian organized crime oligarchs. When one "follows the data" within the Trump campaign, it leads to a bot army with connections to U.S. and British intelligence, without a Russian agent anywhere to be found.